THE FIRST PARAGRAPH GIVES EVIDENCE TO CONRAD BLACK’S IDIOCY: ” I am not one of those whom she can possibly include as making an ad hominem attack on her; I don’t know her, and have never commented on her as a person. She expends considerable space and robust vocabulary attacking “conventional, tightly blinkered historiography” and especially historians from several eminent American universities. Again, this has no possible application to me. I am a stand-alone Roosevelt biographer.”
Wow…no ad-hominem attacks? Is he kidding? In his NRO hissing he did not refute a single one of her assertions but called her “a right wing loopy” who might have “been house trained.” Refined scholars don’t speak that way….maybe convicted fraudsters like him do.
And his comments on Yalta “She ignores the fact that Yalta gave the West all it wanted, including independent and democratic states in Eastern Europe, and that Stalin had to violate that agreement to impose Soviet occupation, starting the Cold War.” He is a historian? No he is a stand alone cur….rsk
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/358122/print
Diana West has exercised her right of rebuttal to the heavy barrage of criticism her book American Betrayal attracted, and mentioned my column in this space on the subject several weeks ago as one to which she was replying. I was deemed to be in the “echo chamber” of a number of critics most of whose comments I have not read. Her book made some startling assertions and attracted severe rejoinders, including mine. I don’t know most of those whom she purports to contradict, and I will not join the minute, line-by-line connection she draws between passages of her book and specific charges by Ron Radosh. I am not one of those whom she can possibly include as making an ad hominem attack on her; I don’t know her, and have never commented on her as a person. She expends considerable space and robust vocabulary attacking “conventional, tightly blinkered historiography” and especially historians from several eminent American universities. Again, this has no possible application to me. I am a stand-alone Roosevelt biographer.
The basic rebuttal process she uses, of miring the exchange in dogmatic argument about the precise meaning of particular words, is a time-honored method of breaking even in the opinion of readers and onlookers by boring everyone in equal-opportunity, no-fault, total-immersion nitpicking. But it is not really successful. Ms. West rises up like a cobra in self-righteous anger at the imputation to her of the opinion that “the FDR administration was ‘run’ by Soviet agents.” But she affirms that “the strategic placement of hundreds of agents of Stalin’s influence inside the U.S. government and other institutions amounted to a de facto occupation. . . . The vast and deep extent of Communist penetration, heretofore denied, had in fact reached a tipping point to become a de facto Communist occupation of the American center of power.”
Precisely these words were among those to which I objected. There were Communist sympathizers and outright Soviet agents in all American administrations from Woodrow Wilson to George H. W. Bush, as there were in all foreign governments (and as there were Western agents in the Soviet government, because naturally and ideologically adversarial regimes do spy on one another), and there were probably more such agents in the Roosevelt administration than in other American governments, which is unsurprising given economic conditions in the Thirties and the common war effort from 1941 to 1945. But there is no evidence, in Ms. West’s book or elsewhere, that they materially influenced policy, any of them, on either side.
